Links[]
| MISSION BRIEF | MISSION START | MISSION DEBRIEF |
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Full Mission can be read in 'bookform' here
Team[]
Team A[]
Team B[]
Mission Summary[]
Briefing[]
A simple mission, and not of the sort we would usually be handling. There is a serial killer in the nearby Endive Colonies with a fairly high body count. We're there to capture or kill him.
The catch is that the serial killer is an Urban Executor, an agent of the UWM who's gone rogue. They are extremely good assassins and spies, with a pile of technology that helps them blend in wherever they are. The UE in question was extremely experienced, with no indication as to why he has gone rogue. He is armed with a razor and an organochemistry overrider: a mind control amp.
The plan is straightforward. The authorities have him tracked down to a small community, and have setup a laser fence to contain him. In order to avoid having him potentially escape, the fence will be activated when we arrive, and the community will not be notified or evacuated. The houses will be occupied with civilians when we approach.
This is going to go so well.
Domestic Dispute[]
The mission begins with the teams usual subtlety and grace. By which we mean they immediately broke down some doors and generally terrorized the inhabitants. In particular, they manage to break the first two adults unconscious, turning their daughter into an orphan. And then essentially kidnap the daughter and take her back to the Sword afterwards. After some further incidents of domestic terror, Travis, who had wandered off from the group, got taken over by the assassin.
The First Victim[]
Once controlled, he got his external radio locked, and had his memory probed for info about the mission. After his head was plundered, the assassin released him. He then quickly told the team what happened via wristpad text and got shocked unconscious for his troubles. While unconscious, all of the suit transmitters got shutoff and he was moved inside of one of the houses. At this point, the teams still causing chaos began to find that several of the locals had stopped responding to them, staring blankly instead of cowering and resisting. When Travis wakes up, he finds himself already standing inside a dark room. Inside the room are the bodies of a family, all in bed and slashed to death, apparently by Travis, whose arms are covered in blood. A message on the drywall reads 'Sleeping Won't Save You From Me'. He picks up the knife and feels as though he has been abandoned by his team and compelled to attack. Leaving the house, the first person he sees is... Ivan the altered monstrosity. He takes a few shots off and gets a swift execution from the air by Milno for his trouble.
By the Numbers[]
During this, a large group of villagers left their houses and gathered around one of the houses in the same sort of daze the team had already seen some of them in. When approached by Kyle, they surrounded him silently. When he threatened one of them, they started speaking in a very odd manner, as if each villager was responsible for a single word of the sentence. They said "It is a mercy, this death I give them. Better this then the coming darkness." What coming darkness? "17.3 degrees, 18th radian." The people then smile as they are launched into the stratosphere by a 4 armed amp wielding behemoth.
The Sun of Fail[]
At this point, the shit really starts to hit the fan. The killer attempts to mindcontrol Mesk, who turns out to be surprisingly resistant to mind control. (Less resistant to Jim's fist, which shatters his spine shortly after he recovers) Then he switches to Kyle, who turns out to be less resistant and in the possession of a manipulator. From the skies, Milno spots a group of villagers running away from the area, and suddenly realizes that the killer probably has 'eyes' on the entire town, via the horde of small animals around town. With line of sight on the whole town, the killer could be anywhere. However, before he can do anything with this information, a distraction appears... The now controlled Kyle, running into the center of town, and attempting to overload his manipulator. Milno lines up a shot and slices him in half before he finishes... But the upper half just keeps going, activating the overload in the center of town. At the same time, Steve reports that one of the laser fence turrets has gone down, breaching containment. As the team scrambles to get the wounded away from the blast zone and the manipulator starts its deadly work, Steve reports that the other pylons are also failing. When one of the team arrives at a pylon, they discover that they've been smashed by some very crispy civilians. With the containment completely gone, the team has nothing they can do but lament on their failures next to the second manipulator overload in as many missions.
Casualties[]
- Travis Strannin (Lost his neck to a sniper)
- Mesk's Spine. Again.
- Kyle's Body
Mysteries[]
There are two mysteries here, one which was setup before the mission, and one which was given to us during the mission, but which we didn't really recognize until much, MUCH later.
The first was, of course, why did this UE go rogue? From everything we know, UWM agents are incredibly loyal to them, by one mean or another. There was no apparent reason for him to go off the deep end, much less like this. Had it gone another way, we may have known more or less about exactly what happened, but as it stands we have exactly two lines from him. The first partially solves the 1st mystery: "It is a mercy, this death I give them. Better this then the coming darkness." This suggests to us why the UE left the UWM: he saw something related to 'the coming darkness', probably on a UWM field op. Whatever it was so affected him that he lost it, and left UWM control to give mercy to people.
The second line opens up the second mystery, which had been forgotten for the better part of a year by us until it came up again recently. The second line was some coordinates: "17.3 degrees, 18th radian." These sound like coordinates of some kind, but are complete nonsense without the appropriate frame of reference. They were mentioned to Steve in mission, who mentioned this fact and disregarded them as a potential distraction at the time. We still don't know what they mean, but assume that it is related to 'the coming darkness'.